Location: Suffolk Aviation Heritage Museum, IP3 8JU
This meet, I always look forward to. East Coast Japanese (“ECJ”) have been established for about 5 years and started because the founders realised there weren’t many Japanese car clubs in the area.
It started off as just a small group of people but they explained that suddenly, more and more owners of Japanese cars came out of the woodworks. They began holding meets and started organising the ECJ Cars and Coffee at the Suffolk Aviation Heritage Museum. It’s surrounded by fields and has so much history contained in it’s buildings.
The museum
I was never one for taking an interest in planes and anything aviation-related but walking around the museum, you can’t help but be in awe of the events that took place while our ancestors were alive. For example, there is a room dedicated to famous aviation females and planes made our of wooden planks and what looks like a garden chair attached to it.
There are remnants of Rolls Royce engines, plane cabins, ejector seats, all for people to look at house in a smaller building and a larger hanger-type building.
The museum does not charge for visitors to walk around the exhibition but they do ask for donations. So to help the museum out, ECJ asks all attendees to donate £2 at the gate which is given to the museum.
Back to the car stuff
Every cars and coffee event that ECJ hosts is big. Japanese cars flock from all over Essex and Suffolk for the chilled out event. There are traders who set up shop selling all kinds of items, from Hot Wheels cars to Japanese coffee cans that are imported over to the UK. There are several burger vans serving hot food, and even the museum serve tea, coffee, biscuits and chocolate bars to help drive up funds.
When the weather is warm and the sun is shining, it’s the perfect day to take a wander round all the modified Japanese cars that people have parked up in. There are literally everything you can think of at the meet. 4×4’s, old sports cars, drift cars, modern day rally cars, kei cars, trucks, barges. When we reference a car as a barge, we mean old, long-wheel base, luxurious executive cars like the Toyota Chaser, Toyota Crown, Toyota Century, Lexus GS 300 etc. It caters to everyone.
If you don’t have a Japanese car, fear not. You can still come along but there is a dedicated car park at the start of the venue for you to park in, and there are normally some nice cars parked up in there too for those to walk around.
Unfortunately I didn’t take many photos are the recent meet but below are some that I did take.
The next ECJ Cars and Coffee morning will be held on Sunday 11th June at 11am. Check out their Facebook group to be notified when their up and coming meets are: East Coast Japanese | Facebook.
The Suffolk Aviation Heritage Museum are also hosting a Summer Show on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th June from 11am until 4pm if you fancied taking a look for yourself at some of the amazing history they display.
